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It's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got.

Alex Steffen

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Alex Steffen
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Environmentalist
Writer
Oakland
California
Survive
Better
Enough
Something
Make

More quotes by Alex Steffen

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For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.
Alex Steffen
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I think we're going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it's more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care.
Alex Steffen
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Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.
Alex Steffen
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There is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place.
Alex Steffen
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Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there.
Alex Steffen
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You don't change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of 'Save the Earth' bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster.
Alex Steffen
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If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
Alex Steffen
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The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.
Alex Steffen
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We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.
Alex Steffen
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Powerful people doing bad things LIKE cynical, despairing citizens.
Alex Steffen
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Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.
Alex Steffen
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Carbon zero simply means that the emissions you are releasing either are zero or balance out to zero.
Alex Steffen
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In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don't want change are able to block change.
Alex Steffen
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Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.
Alex Steffen
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Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.
Alex Steffen
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For most people, using the Internet broadens their sense of who 'we' is and actually ends up leaving us in a place of greater compassion and understanding. It leaves us more connected to a larger group of people and more at one with a lot more people in our community.
Alex Steffen
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Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.
Alex Steffen
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Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.
Alex Steffen
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The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.
Alex Steffen
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By looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're setting ourselves up not to solve it.
Alex Steffen